Operation Caspian Tiger

by Addison Gunn

  It all looked wrong to Miller, the dismembered bundles of flesh dangling from paracord belonged in a scene from a horror movie, not New York.

  All the same, it kept the smarter predators away, or so the Shank team members said. But half of them were ex-Army volunteers young and old, and Miller knew what kinds of men wound up in the Army. More specifically, what kinds wound up as ex-Army. There had been a domestic terrorist in his battalion—a full-on white-supremacist who believed that if white people weren’t going to make an effort to outbreed every other race in America, at some point there would need to be a culling. How the hell that guy had slipped through the screening process Miller had no idea. Apparently the home-grown militias and domestic terrorist organizations made an effort to send their best through the Army to receive free training. Gangs, too.

  Miller eyed the distant stretch of fence he could make out from the midst of the refugee run between sectors two and six. The dark shadows of the hanging bodies—almost familiar enough to look like cats and dogs in silhouette—made Miller wonder just how Shank’s volunteers had got booted out the Army.

  “How much money do you have on you?” Morland asked, just barely in Miller’s peripheral vision. Morland had picked a perfect angle to make him flinch and clutch his rifle.

  Miller did his best to settle himself back down, and reached for his back pockets, not his sidearm. “Hundred and fifty?” Miller ventured, checking his wallet. “Two fifty-ish. You want beer money?”

  “Nah, that ain’t remotely enough. Don’t you have any other cash?”

  He shrugged. “Spent most of my cash already.” On getting his suits dry cleaned and pressed, not that he was ever going to wear them again.

  “Come on, you’ve got to try t-bird steak! They’re starting to figure out how to cook it decently, so the price is getting extortionate.”

  “So long as they’re not cooking it rare—fuck knows what kinds of bugs are infesting those things.”

  Morland waved off Miller’s concern. “When they tried that, it tasted of piss.”

  Miller allowed himself to be dragged away from his patch of shady wall, and joined the rest of his team goggling at the barbecue cook attacking the lopped off bits of titan-bird with a couple of cleavers. The bird was a big one. There had to be more than a hundred and fifty pounds of its stinking guts alone. One wing still flopped over the fencing overhead, providing impromptu shade as stretches of its other wing were hacked up, skinned, and fried. Even at the rate the cook was working, it’d be a long, long time before they had to drag down the second wing.

  The trick, it seemed, was to avoid the beast’s flight muscles. A few hunks were drooling blood into a gutter nearby—there was a forlorn hope that draining the creature’s blood would improve the flavor—but the wing’s relatively scrawny flesh could be cooked immediately.

  Du Trieux wafted a shrivelled, scorched scrap of meat clinging to a chipped piece of yellowy bone under his nose; it smelled better than anything. Maybe it was the spices—some kind of dry rub rustled up out of rations.

  “What?” Miller pleaded, trailing after her. “You’re not going to let me try a piece?”

  Du Trieux grinned and darted back out of reach. “At the prices they’re selling for? You’re crazy!”

  It took two loops of the little knot of people, his team, and a couple of friendly refugees, including a woman a little younger than du Trieux but with a smile that was far more captivating for her availability. Plus, she was the one handling the money and selling beer.

  “How much?” Miller asked, gesturing at the cooler behind her.

  She looked him up and down. “How much you got?”

  “Two hundred fifty or so.”

  “Eeeh...” She looked back at the cooler. “I guess I can give you a beer for that.”

  “And one of the wings?” He jerked his head toward the barbecue.

  She laughed. For a moment, just a moment, Miller wanted to try and live in a world with laughs like that again, but he couldn’t help thinking about what he’d done to earn that world.

  Memories flooded his mind. The violent pang in the back of his head—the sensation of punching a knife’s tip through bone.

  It just wouldn’t go away.

  He was glad she was looking back at the barbecue, and then at his M27—not at him. Glad he didn’t have to meet her eyes, or cross the fence between soldier and civilian to be a barbecue cook, have to handle a cleaver. He wouldn’t have to touch anything like that until it was time to kill again.

  “What calibre’s that gun?” the seller asked.

  “Five-five-six,” Miller said without thinking about it.

  She squinted, and called back to the cook, “Jeff? Five-five-six’s the same as two-two-three? Was that right?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s right, Honey.”

  It wasn’t, not exactly; Miller’s dad had blown out a perfectly good .223 rifle with Army surplus 5.56mm rounds. But he didn’t point that out when she turned and flashed her smile at him again. It had lost a little power through ‘Honey.’ Miller was as likely to make a move on her as he was on du Trieux now, but it was still a very good smile. Especially for a saleswoman.

  “A four-inch piece for ten bullets,” she said. “Or, you can have an eight-inch piece for fifteen.”

  He blinked at her. “You’re selling food for ammunition?”

  “Money ain’t worth much anymore,” she said, shrugging with a smile. “And if those guys kick us out to Boston”—she jerked her head in the direction of the Cove’s shining towers—“we’re going to have to protect ourselves somehow.”

  Miller looked up at the window he’d stood at with Gray not that long ago, and bit his lip. “Guess so,” he said, wondering if Harris and the rest of internal security had any idea that the refugees were stockpiling guns and ammunition. Wasn’t his problem, though. He pulled the drum magazine from his M27 and stripped fifteen rounds out for her, setting them in her outstretched hand.

  She bobbed daintily, went back to the barbecue and got him his spiced up piece of titan-bird. Big one. And then all the cash he had left over, for a beer, too.

  Other than the sellers—it looked a lot like Doyle was making some kind of illicit drugs trade with a scrawny refugee to one side—Cobalt and the civilians surrounding the barbecue didn’t mix much. But the atmosphere was good. No fear of a food riot, no hammered-in oppression. Just the surprisingly tangy flesh of the titan-bird’s wing, crispy on the bone, lovingly smothered with dry-rub so it tasted of mustard and pepper. Mouthwatering, and good with the beer.

  Bit by bit Miller drifted to the edge of the Cobalt group, joining in on a conversation between du Trieux and one of the refugees, laughing about how extortionately priced the barbecue was.

  “First of all,” the refugee laughed, “the meat’s a literal fuckin’ windfall. Second of all, they’re overcharging. There’s gonna be plenty of food once those oil tankers get turned into floating farms, y’know? This is artificial scarcity. Someone’ll rustle up some rabbits or something. We’ll feed them on oil tanker lettuce, barbecue every weekend. You’ll see.”

  “There are chickens somewhere around Massachusetts. Get about thirty, forty fresh eggs in a week,” Miller said, chipping in.

  “That’s for the ivory tower boys, right?” The refugee laughed. “Well, at least there are still living chickens somewhere.”

  “And there’s still flour coming in. Trouble with the sacks, though. I’ve seen it coming in through barrels.” Du Trieux shifted her weight from foot to foot thoughtfully. “What’s it like in the black market?”

  The refugee bit his lip, eyeing Miller. “Well,” he said, noncommittally. “Not that I’d know about that.”

  “If I cared about the black market, I wouldn’t be standing here letting that happen,” Miller said, nodding towards the barbecue. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  That got a very twisted smile out of the refugee. “Nothing to worry about anyway—it’s all stuff people tra
de out of their own ration packs, right?”

  “Right,” Miller said, thinking about that bastard with the rations at the warehouse a few days before.

  “But you can get a lot, a lot, for powdered milk.” He continued staring at Miller and du Trieux, as if through their company connections they could produce live cattle with a snap of the fingers. “You guys seen any fresh milk?”

  “...Month ago?” du Trieux ventured. “Maybe two? Before the compound wall was finished, anyway.”

  The refugee didn’t seem entirely convinced. Surely the corporate bastards had all kinds of stuff hidden under their combat uniforms, right? He gnawed his lip a moment, then blew out a wishful sigh. “Well. There’ve gotta be safe farms somewhere. Maybe up in Canada, y’know? Someplace it’s too cold for all those bastards,” he said, gesturing up at the partly-dismembered titan-bird.

  It’d have to be pretty far north to be that cold in midsummer, now. But maybe. Not everywhere was as hard-hit as New York, anyway. There wasn’t much news available about what was going on in the rest of the world—collapsing governments made surprisingly little noise when they pulled the media and journalism apparatus down with them.

  “They’ve got some good ranches up there. Saskatchewan, Alberta, around there. Probably some smart guy moved his herds north,” Miller ventured. “Could happen, easy.”

  “Hope so. A steak. Big, fat and juicy. That’d really hit the spot. Maybe if they start letting civilian traffic in and out of the compound, we can get some stuff in from Canada—then we’ll see about a black market, huh?” The refugee laughed. “Maple syrup, that’s what I’m talking about. You know Canadians use maple syrup for barbecue? That’d be something to try...”

  Later, after Miller and the rest of the team had blown a firefight’s worth of ammunition on getting themselves fed—ammunition, its supply, and whether or not the refugees were armed was Harris’s problem, and fuck Harris—Miller stood back with du Trieux, leaning in the shadow of a wall, ostensibly watching the civilians haul the butchered pieces of the titan-bird away, leaving its bloodstains on the paving.

  Miller gazed across the refugee run at the moving profile of Doyle’s jaw. In an official capacity, Miller was pretty sure he was chewing gum. In a social capacity, he was pretty sure he was just interested in scoring another hit of something beautifully numbing off Doyle.

  His gaze flicked to the moving civilians, the now-unattainable seller he knew as ‘Honey,’ women too old or too young for him, men he felt uncomfortable thinking of approaching without the social lubricants of alcohol, loud music, and clothing that signalled something other than ‘I’m a soldier’ or ‘I’m a refugee without easy access to water.’ He felt longing, but not desire.

  Miller glanced down at the bottle by his foot, but he’d finished his beer long ago. “Trix?”

  “Oui?”

  “You’ve done this kind of thing before. How do you transition between fighting and being human?”

  She leaned back, her eyes drifting nowhere in particular. “Fighting the Daesh wasn’t like this.”

  “No?”

  “The fighting was short, decisive. Nothing like what happened in the bank.”

  The bank office had been reasonably secure. A logical place to fortify. Miller would have done anything to go back and change that decision now.

  “The difficult parts were not what we did, it was what we saw,” du Trieux went on. “The aftermath.”

  Miller shifted uncomfortably, thinking of the aftermath of what he’d done.

  “Miller?” she asked.

  “You think they’ve got a future?” he said. “This new society we’ve built?” He flicked his gaze toward the refugees making their way between sectors.

  “Perhaps.” She sounded wistful. “A better chance than many have had.”

  “And for us?”

  “How do you mean?”

  He slouched down. “How do we fit into whatever future they’ve got? We’re why they’re stuck behind the fences.”

  Gunfire rattled in the distance. They both looked up, but didn’t see or hear anything else. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sound, probably someone taking potshots at another titan-bird. Du Trieux watched the sky for a moment before answering. “I don’t know.”

  “How do we wake up knowing we committed mass murder so Joe Average over there can sell t-bird hotdogs?”

  “Well,” she said, “he can take the safety to do that for granted. We can’t do that—you can’t—but what you did gives them the option to quietly get on living their lives without fear.”

  Without fear? Lucky for them. What about him?

  The gunfire returned, and then there was the distinctive chained rumble of a burst of 40mm grenades going off. It wasn’t someone taking pot shots at a titan-bird, it was one of the escort Bravos. Within seconds, the emergency response alarms shrilled across the compound.

  So much for freedom to live without fear.

  Didn’t seem to Miller that he’d done a good enough job for the refugees to have that.

  5

  THE REFUGEE RUNS weren’t designed for a combat team to get anywhere in a hurry. They were designed to keep the civilians moving along like well-behaved cattle.

  Miller hit the fence a second ahead of Doyle, launched himself off it back along the hairpin turn. He grabbed and pushed down a civilian—Miller didn’t see them as anything more than a dirty brown shirt—and charged through the now-unoccupied gate. Metal rang behind him. Hsiung trailed him, but the whole team was on the move with the same coordination they’d used out in the field hunting the Charismatics. This time, though, they were on home turf and they were seriously disadvantaged.

  Dystopian prison architecture and hundreds of miles of chain-link fence was the least of their problem. There was motion everywhere. People were everywhere.

  With a quiet roar of footsteps, the mob crashed around a corner, chasing Doyle towards the bank. Miller followed a few metres behind.

  Then between them a titan-bird landed above, coming down on the fencing looped overhead specifically to protect the refugees from the titan-birds. It was a little one, twenty-foot wingspan or so—a silent mass of stretched skin and bony wings. It hobbled around above on its knuckles, wings folded, and it jabbed down, trying to break the fencing. Its teeth snagged and caught on the weave as it wailed, beating its wings in an attempt to free itself.

  Miller shot it on the run. It screamed, tearing at the overhead chain-link fencing, so he stopped and shot until the thing stopped moving. Chipped remnants of its skull poured out through the fencing along with its brains and splattered onto the ground below.

  The human screams bore into Miller’s head. Human screams felt like a threat. Like a mob. But the Infected lunged at him, hated him, the refugees cowered away into the corners of the run like terrified animals. He had to shake his head just to clear his mind, remind him of where he was, what he was doing.

  He gave his M27 a shake—the drum magazine was light, too light. “If we run out of ammo,” he yelled over the ringing in his ears, “because of barbecue, you are all in very big trouble!”

  “Why us?” Morland asked, stepping around the spatter. “You were the one paying for everything.”

  “You should have stopped me,” Miller snapped back—more vicious than he meant to be.

  They got into refugee sector six, one of the holding pens, and immediately pushed through the clusters of shacks, tents, and prefabricated buildings clustered around the old tower—a dilapidated structure with a dozen floors packed to the brim with refugees.

  More titan-birds clawed at the wire fencing overhead.

  Parts of it had privacy screening woven through to provide shade—but now it provided the titan-birds solid footing to scrabble and claw at the weak points where lengths of fencing had been wired together.

  Miller lifted his M27 to fire on instinct, then saw Hsiung doing the same, following his lead. “Hold fire!” he yelled. “Check background, check background!”
>
  He hadn’t seen what he was doing until he saw Hsiung doing it. They were pointing their guns at the titan-birds—and at the tower behind them. The tower filled with civilians.

  “Leave it!” Miller started moving again. “We have to get out of the civilian section!”

  Miller came to a halt at the abandoned sector gate. It was supposed to be locked—refugees were fleeing through, fighting to get deeper into the compound and away from the walls—but there weren’t any guards.

  Du Trieux and Doyle seemed to be having a similar thought. Doyle picked up something that looked a lot like the lock and chain and showed it to du Trieux. The chain had been neatly shorn apart with a pair of bolt cutters.

  In the chaos, Miller tried his earbud again. The security channel was broadcasting the same order it had been since the alarms sounded. “All staff report to emergency stations! Attack is imminent or underway. All staff report—” Miller snapped it off, flicking through channels as quickly as the limited interface on the earbud let him.

  “Problem on the boulevard.”

  “That fucking thug-behemoth?”

  “Think they killed it, but some asshole just shot the truck driver.”

  Guards on top of the wall? Miller tried another channel, racing after his team towards the motor pool.

  “We’re under fire! Under fire! No, I don’t know from whe—”

  The channel went quiet but for the crackle of nearby gunfire. If whoever the speaker had been talking to was on another channel, Miller couldn’t hear them.

  Miller tapped du Trieux on the shoulder and moved up. They pushed ahead in short bounds, covering each other. Doyle lagged behind, lugging his .388 custom rifle with him.

  Miller didn’t have to give the order—the refugees had thinned out and things were scarily quiet as they approached the motor pool. They reached the compound wall in no time.